Now for some sample words and how they are pronounced.

zhahaba : (he) went. Perfect verb to go, singular masculine and third person. There are no tricks here just a thal, fat7ah, heh, fat7ah, and beh fat7ah. Since the vowels are not written, this word can also be read as: zhahab which means gold. Confusing?
 

qeTTah : Cat-female-singular. Note the shaddah on the Tah and how the fat7ah is mixed with it. The last letter is a teh-marbutah which may be pronounced as an h or a t depending on the sentence. This is often used as a female gender indicator (look in special difficulties). Removing the indicator gives Qitt which is a grammatically correct singular male cat. Note how pronouncing the terminal tanween is not important in this case. In a sentence, however it may have to be pronounced Qett-ttaton.
 

kalb or kalbon: Dog-male-singular. Note how the sokoon leads to no vowels after the lam. Adding the female indicator would yield kalbah which is grammatically correct. The tanween yields kalbon when appropriate. Adding the female indicator at the end gives kalbah which is a singular female dog.

Now for a more serious excercise, here is the banner from the Home page, try to transliterate it:

Drag around the space below to see the answer:
translit: mqdmh fy allghh al3rbyh
With vowels: moqademmah fy alloghah al3arabiyah
translation: Introduction to Arabic language.
Solution ends here.

Numbers:
In Arabic we don't use Arabic numerals to write numbers!! Actually we write Hindi numbers. There is nothing special here, but  the decimal point is written as a comma. It is not incorrect to use Arabic numerals in Arabic, many people are now promoting abandoning Hindi numerals, so if you don't feel like re-learning counting feel free to use Arabic numbers.

Final notes:
One last word on writing. Historically Arabic was written in many ways. The oldest form used letters without dots, so in that form beh and teh would look the same (not quite, but let's assume they did). As people found this a bit too nonsensical they added the dots. In some archaic pointed texts you would also find letters and diactricals that you won't find in modern arabic. For example in the Qur'an the combination wa is sometimes pronounced aa, and some very special diactricals and indicators are used to tell you how you should say the word, where you may stop, and where you can't stop for breath.

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